Mac versus Windows OS Support Timeline.
I've been looking into the differences in support profiles between Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS. The prevailing modus operandi of Apple is that it will continue to support the last two operating systems with security updates. So that means with the current OS being High Sierra which launched last autumn, Apple will continue to support its two predecessors, Sierra and El Capitan, with El Capitan support set to end in the autumn of 2018.
I realise Apple don't publish OS support timelines, but taking the above as what's been happening for the last few years, it means that when you buy a new Mac, as I did in February 2016, you can expect less than three years support for the OS that it shipped with - or a little over two years if you bought just before a new OS launched.
What's interesting to me is to compare this with Microsoft's approach.
Extended security support for Windows Vista only ended in April 2017 - a full 11 years after Vista appeared on the scene and nearly seven years after Microsoft stopped selling Vista.
This makes Apple seem appallingly unsupportive towards their loyal customer base in terms of OS support.
So what are the counter arguments?
I dare say Apple would argue that since their platform is less susceptible to viruses and other malware, that an old OS can be used for longer in relative safety without security updates.
I dare say they would also argue that their hardware and software is designed with the intention of changing the OS annually, and in this regard, the figures more closely match - High Sierra is advertised as being compatible with iMacs dating back to 2009.
But this is where I begin to take issue. Each OS tends to be bigger, heavier and more resource-hungry than its predecessor. Yes, High Sierra will run on a 2009 iMac, but I'm willing to bet that it won't run anywhere near as quickly or smoothly on that machine as OS-X 10.6, Snow Leopard, which is the system those iMacs would have shipped with.
Not only that, but as many of us have learned through bitter experience, the OS upgrade path is seldom smooth. One has only to look at the forums to see the myriad of problems caused to countless users when they try to keep up.
This of course is not to mention the ongoing saga of broken software that each OS upgrade inflicts on its victims. If I have to buy yet another copy of Photoshop Elements when I was perfectly happy with the first one I had, I'm going to go crazy! And don't even talk to me about Pages, the software where every update takes you further back through the 1990s in terms of its desktop publishing capabilities and features! (Double page spread view removed, for instance! Really!? I could do that in PageMaker in 1989!!!).
So where does that leave the home user, like me, who isn't interested in bells and whistles, who doesn't want the latest shiny toy for the sake of it, who has no desire to show off their hardware to their peers as a fashion accessory, and who just wants to get their system running nicely and then leave it alone for the next decade so they can be productive. Or perhaps more pertinently, the business user, small or large, who simply cannot afford to keep buying essentially the same software applications over and over again, or lose many hours of productivity annually chasing their tail to get their Mac networks back on the same (new) hymn sheet as insisted upon by Apple?
Are we really now facing the reality that Microsoft, with its much longer support timeline for the same OS, offers a better, long term home for those individuals and businesses than Apple does? And perhaps more depressingly, does Apple even care?
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), i5 Quad Core, 2.8GHz, 16GB RAM
